


Chiaroscuro

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Some Battlefront II spoilers, Warnings/tags as I go, battlefront II is AMAZING
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 22:24:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12735510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Rey pieces together her past, her identity. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is unraveling faster than Han shot Greedo...





	Chiaroscuro

**Author's Note:**

> So I just had to write this after I watched the full Battlefront II campaign...oh my god, it's so good! Don't read if you don't want spoilers!

## Chapter One

 

 

 

 

 

All she could see was darkness.

Cold, all encompassing darkness. It filled every crag and cleft in the maritime cave and seemed to even seep through her very skin. Rey shivered at the thought.

 

Upon entering, she had expected some grand reception of the force to spirit her away, similar to how it had beneath the saloon on Takodana. But an immeasurable amount of time had passed, and still nothing of the sort had happened. It made her feel slightly insecure; as though she were not welcome, or perhaps not destined for a life learning the force after all.

 

"What am I even looking for?" She asked the barren cavern in frustration. The sound echoed off of the walls, and then petered off into silence. Rey huffed in defeat.

 

" _...You know how I can find it._ "

 

The suddenness of the voice startled her, but not as much as it's familiarity. It was flat and strident, and seemed perpetually on the cusp of utter rage. This was the voice of _Kylo Ren_.

 

" _I don't know what you're talking about._ "

 

A second man replied. No... it couldn't be. She knew this speaker. From a fantasy, an illusion. _Stay here. I'll come back for you._ They had once told her. _I'll come back, sweetheart. I promise._ A pledge left unfulfilled. A lie.

 

" _Show me where the old man took it._ "

 

Rey frowned. Took what? She wanted to see these phantoms, this vision being teased. The voices seemed to come from no particular direction at all—there wasn't a way to approach them. She thought of her prior question, how it was almost a catalyst, and pursed her lips.

 

"Show me." She called again to no one.

 

All at once the darkness surrounding her rippled like heat waves radiating off of metal under Jakku's unforgiving sun, and revealed the bridge of a foreign ship. However, on the same token, there was something distinctly familiar about it. It was an imperial corvette, she decided, but this one wasn't rotting in the Starship Graveyard. No. It was still well-kept, and beyond the transparisteel was a strange landscape that wobbled similarly to the edges of her vision. Corals grew from crude rock and cobalt oceans reached to the horizon.

 

An agonising scream made her twist in shock. What she found was enough to make her gasp and stumble back.

 

There, kneeling before the blackened figure of Kylo Ren, had to be the man from her dreams. He had brown hair and two hazel eyes which she recognised... these were the same eyes that stared back at her in her reflection. Then this man could be—

 

Suddenly the ground gave way and she was falling through the warped halls of a star destroyer she had once scavenged. The erosion process reversed through time as she fell, and where once sand and long angular shadows had been, now blazed a maelstrom of fire and chaos. Stormtroopers barked into intercoms and a piercing evacuation siren blared, yet not louder than the deafening roar of the ship itself.

 

" _...I'm coming Del._ "

 

It was all happening so fast. She could barely make sense of anything, when finally she hit solid ground. Her boots echoed in the massive hollow of a sandstone basilica. Above her were tall ceilings and a single chandelier made of glittering glass, but there was something more to them. They sung. Rey's eyes narrowed and then widened when at once she concluded that these were shards of kyber.

 

The magnified sound of paper folding over caught her attention.

 

All around her were aisles of bookshelves, each on a perfect angle that pointed to her—or the centre of the room. She followed their directions to her feet, where a strange circular pattern had been carved into raw stone. The whole scene was rather unstable though, occasionally shifting and troves of faint, unrelated conversations stuttering through.

 

Another page flipped. It was much louder than it should have been, much more pronounced. A prominent part of whatever she'd come to see, then? She briefly saw a figure reading an old tome, one that reminded her of home.

 

" _A had a feeling you would come._ " Master Luke?

 

In a blink the whole atheneum was up in flames. Yet, the echo of mundane millings continued around her. An infant wailed, hushed with affectionate words.

 

" _I'm sorry if we're interrupting._ " A woman was saying. She stirred something in Rey's heart, her very smell close to an intimate memory.

 

She saw a band of dark warriors besiege and ransack the archives for information. Books and artefacts were torn through and discarded.

 

" _You helped me once on Pillio, because I asked._ " The same person from the corvette, and her dreams.

 

Meanwhile a boy with dark hair and a soulful stare was received by the chaos. He wore carob leather overalls and a black tunic underneath. His boots were smattered with mud, or maybe blood, along with his hands—which clenched around the hilt of a familiar lightsaber. _Her_ lightsaber.

 

" _Will you help us now?_ "

 

The boy passed the pillagers and went straight to a predestined shelf row, as if he knew where the possession they required had been stashed. He ripped the contents out and pried open a secret compartment on the backboard, only to find it vacant. His shoulders hunched and tousled hair dripped with sweat. Rey blinked, terrified by the unpredictability of his cracking, erratic energy. Then he snapped his head and roared, the shelves splintering and being crushed beneath an invisible weight. A blue beam hacked into ornate wooden furniture, a blasphemous use of the precious weapon she so respected.

 

" _I'm afraid I can't._ " _Or won't_ , her mind supplied accusingly.

 

Rey turned on her heel and ran from the devastation. But as she passed through the cracked archway of the building, the land beyond the threshold changed, and now endless plains of sand and shifting razorbacks were her setting. She knew where this was. And she did not want to see. No, these feelings were still raw. But the temple was gone, the fires quenched, and all dark disciples vanished. There was no escaping it, no leaving. She was tied here for much the same reason as when she was a child.

 

" _You need to hide now._ " _The_ voice told a girl on the gangway of a silver shuttle. " _There is so much you don't understand._ "

 

" _Don't leave._ " The girl pleaded, even as she was led toward the waiting hand of the crolute Unkar Plutt.

 

The world around these three figures constantly flitted with vague X-wing and fighter phantoms battling it out on the midday haze. The woman from elsewhere in her vision ushered warm words above it all, gentle croons that seemed at odds with her formidable nature.

 

" _Stay here. I'll come back for you._ "

 

She saw the dedlanite muzzle of a blaster aim at that same man's chest, and red plasma flashed her back and forth between the two conflicting scenarios.

 

Jakku on one hand, where he smiled and kissed the girl's forehead.

And the cold, lonely bridge, where he was dispatched with a cruel kind of satisfaction.

 

" _No!_ " The girl wailed.

 

" _I'll come back, sweetheart. I promise._ "

 

And Rey was left gazing, blary eyed, at the body of him on the corvette. Her father. She could feel it in her heart.

 

" _Come back! No!_ " The child continued, oblivious to his fate.

 

All those years spent, waiting on a dead man. The visions seemed to have come full circle and Rey doubled over, touching his peaceful face. It felt so real... so torturously real.

 

" _I have what I came for. He's yours, now. Clean this up._ " Kylo Ren's disembodied mask gravelled out distantly.

 

Her fingers clawed into the rough fabric beneath them. Tears pattered down and left small damp patches, and at last she let out strickened sobs.

 

 

- 

 

 

Kylo Ren sucked in a deep breath through the muzzle of his apparatus.

 

The girl had entered a nexus, and dreamed of her beginning. Her story. It was inevitable; she would discover his envolvement in _Del Meeko's_ death eventually, but he had hoped she would not be so blinded in light by then. It only made seducing her needlessly difficult.

 

She still held some naive belief in the sanctity of family. His actions would be sacrilege to her; not only had he eliminated her biological parent, but also...—

 

His fists tensed.

 

No, her relationship with _Han Solo_ was her own foolish error. He would not feel guilt over an order Leader Snoke had bestowed.

 

...And yet he did.

 

Ren ripped the helmet from his face and threw it at the floor of his rooms, feeling unworthy of everything it represented. Feeling disgusting. It clanged and rolled some place away where he wouldn't have to see it any longer. He felt guilt for the scavenger, for his mother. For everybody he had ever scorned. For his father.

 

His knees gave way beneath him and he clutched the sides of his head. He should be free of this pain and weakness. But the grief he was responsible for, the cries that echoed from her lips and churned like a violent ocean in his mind... it was tearing him apart, piece by piece.

 

He was vaguely aware of her exhausted hiccups in the farthest reaches of his perception. She was no longer dreaming, though she remained in the cave with her knees pulled up against her chest, and face buried into them. She did not want to face anyone in her forlorn state, so she waited out the waves that buffeted her, alone.

 

Her voice was so small and broken. She may as well have speared him through the gut with her lightsaber, though.

 

" _One day._ " _I'll see you again_ , was her unspoken vow.

 

In a furious motion, his fists slammed into the glossy obsidian tiles and he bellowed at the bare reflection he saw there. _Monster_ , she had called him once.

 

She was right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know if i should continue or leave it one-shot


End file.
